232 can be a dense tangle of assertion and rebuttal. Especially appealing is the simultaneous attentiveness to literary and philosophical topics, for example, Mr. Cope’s insight about ‘‘Woolston’s commitment to eighteenth-century literarycritical and aesthetic ideals’’ and Mr. Venturo’s framework of the beast fable for understanding Bridoul’s School. A gentle chide: Mr. Cope opposes an ‘‘acute concern for identity issues found in gender studies’’ to the study of Augustan religion in the Preface. Certainly it is the case that much study of gender has overlooked the importance of religion , but we also cannot ignore the work that has been done—and needs to continue—on gender and or within religious writings. It is arguable, for example , that an interest in women writers such as Mary Astell has increased our collective knowledge of eighteenth-century religion. A full understanding of the rhetorical tactics deployed in these debates would involve some study of the subtle role of gender. Notwithstanding this minor point, this collection is excellent . Laura M. Stevens University of Tulsa COSTICA BRADATAN. The Other Bishop Berkeley: An Exercise in Reenchantment . New York: Fordham, 2006. Pp. x ⫹ 227. $55. The George Berkeley whom we have all grown to know and love in histories of philosophy is a critic of abstractions who ridicules believers in the mystical existence of things beyond our perception . He insists that common sense requires that we limit our claims to what we actually see, and that means thinking of things in the world simply in terms of regular patterns in what we experience . Of course, we experience only our ideas, but that in no way threatens our ability to say that we daily confront the real world. His New Theory of Vision (1709) and Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) are thus reminders of just how solidly he is a man whose feet are firmly on the ground. But then there are Berkeley’s other, troubling works—writings that embarrass hardcore commentators as much as Newton’s fascination with numerology and alchemy. Berkeley’s fixation on nature as a language, his invocation of Neoplatonic and hermetic sources, and his insistence on tar water as a panacea that links all things physical and spiritual seem to have little connection to the enchanting clarity of his early insights. In spending so much time thinking about vision and the intricacies of knowledge, Berkeley seems a visionary himself, swept up in the gnosis of idealism and carried off by a longing for a paradise not of this world (except perhaps in Bermuda). Mr. Bradatan draws our attention to this other Bishop Berkeley. The Bishop ’s attempt to establish a college in America and his later writings— especially Alciphron (1732) and Siris (1744)—are made intelligible by contextualizing them in utopian thinking, Christian apologetics, and Platonism. Steeped in the tradition of Plato, Hermes Trismegistos, Plotinus, and Ficino, this reenchanted Berkeley finds the key for the elixir of life and moral salvation in doctrines that portray all things as expressions in the book of nature and links in the great chain of being. Even the early Berkeley invokes such themes when he describes how divine archetypes are models for human knowledge. But in the current account, the Principles and the Dialogues between Hylas 233 and Philonous (1713) are overshadowed by the ‘‘unavoidable’’ triumph in Siris of esoteric wisdom, the Christian ‘‘mystical alchemy’’ of tar water, and the Neoplatonic subordination of matter. Berkeley is considered in contexts with which he is seldom associated. Chapters highlight his subversive literary procedures and rhetorical techniques , the resonance of his visuallanguage doctrine with the medieval tradition of the Book of the World, the alchemical background of Siris, the role of Christian apologetics in Alciphron, the eschatological and utopian character of Berkeley’s Bermuda project, and (most puzzlingly) how the Cathar characterization of matter as the source of evil helps in explaining Berkeley’s immaterialism . It is this last theme that raises questions about the underlying assumptions of the whole book, because unlike the Cathars, Berkeley does not think of matter and the natural world as the source of evil. Rather, for Berkeley, thinking that matter exists apart from what we perceive is the source of...